Books Pick: Dark Passages

The title of Dennis Cooper’s provocative and deliberately puzzling new novel, “The Marbled Swarm,” refers to the depraved narrator’s style of speaking and writing—“a dollop of the haughty triple-speak British royals employ to keep their hearts reclusive, some of the tricked, incautious slang that dumbs down young Americans, a dollop of the stiff, tongue-twisting, jammed-up sentence structure and related terseness that comes with being German … and a few other international ingredients.” This linguistic “swarm” was taught to the narrator and his brothers by their father, who used it to exercise power over his sons in sinister and ambiguous ways. Cooper’s interest in exploring the darkest corners of the human experience—incest, rape, cannibalism—has not dimmed with age. The novel’s contradictory narratives intentionally echo the secret passageways in which the narrator’s predatory activities take place, creating a baroque, voyeuristic effect.

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